Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms optimally adjusttheir capital investment in response to discount rate changes. Consistent with the discount-ratehypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future returns increaseswith the...

Since 2000 a number of factors impacted agricultural markets drastically. Among these are structuralchanges in global demand and repeated supply constraints that supported the observed positive development ofagricultural prices. Given the increasingly interdependent global markets, the question...

This dissertaion is comprised of two essays on econometric evaluation of models of commodity futures prices. The first essay develops a frequency- domain volatility bound approach that can be used to evaluate possibly mis-specified models. The proposed method allows us to detect model failures...